Drugs Distributed On The Internet Without
Controls

The Internet is being used to advertise and
distribute drugs from one nation to the next with no controls,
according to a report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Drugs that have not been tested and drugs that have been clearly
proved to be ineffective or even unsafe are being advertised and sold
on the Internet, note the authors, Dr. Uwe Troger and Professor Frank
P. Meyer from the University Hospital in Magdeburg, Germany.

Companies selling such drugs deceive people with their ads. They
use bogus "citations" from medical journals to lead people to believe
that there is no danger in the use of their supposedly "highly
effective" drugs.

These practices, it is feared, may also discourage patients from
going to their doctor for prescriptions of legitimate effective
medicines.

In response to a patient's question about the usefulness of a
multivitamin preparation in preventing and treating cardiovascular
diseases, Troger and Meyer investigated a drug called Vitacor 20/90
that is being advertised intensively on the Internet and marketed by
a California company called Health Now which is distributing it in
Germany via the Netherlands.

Health Now claims that this multivitamin product can prevent and
treat cardiovascular diseases. The authors found that these claims
were not based on proper evidence for the alleged beneficial effects
on morbidity, mortality, and quality of life associated with coronary
heart disease, heart insufficiency, high blood pressure, arrhythmia,
and diabetes.

The uncontrolled advertising of drugs and "nutritional
supplements" in electronic media such as the Internet poses a
potential health hazard.